In the 90s, cars from the 70s and 60s were seen as classic, but in 2022 cars from the 90s or 2000s can still be seen in daily use, and in terms of body design, many don’t even look that far off modern cars. What happened around the late 80s?

Question

Edit: great responses, Reddit. People have largely addressed the form factor aspect of my question. But am I wrong in sensing that cars from the late 90s seem to be more reliable and functionally acceptable in 2022, than most cars from the 70s were in the 90s? Was there some engineering breakthrough that made them more long lived?

In: 91

Answer 1

Haven’t seen it yet here, but two major things that changed how cars look are modern metal and plastic forming that changed exteriors/interiors and ergonomics studies going into interiors.

If you look at old cars, many things were done by hand in many cases, they look great. Flowing lines, interesting shapes, lots of details. Then come early robots and casting, and suddenly all cars are boxy dreadful (mostly, some became classic) and extremely oversimplified designs to fit into this automated production. Similarly interiors were created to fit early robot and plastic molds. Noone cared if this looked cheap and boxy…

Modern cars look modern mostly because even cheap brands can afford lots of details on the outside with modern metal and plastic methods and good, well thought out interiors (at least sometimes) made around ergonomics of using everything inside.

So old old cars look great because they were made by hand, and cars from turn of the century, at least some, look modern because they used modern production means. The early automation period mixed with global economy driving the sells of cheap cars gave us dreadful ’80s and ’90s shoeboxes…